by P. T. Hylton
She Pulled Back.
“Give us the book, and we’ll leave,” Wilm said.
Alice took a step forward. If she distracted them, maybe Vee wouldn’t notice the shed.
“Hey boss!” Alice yelled at the sky. “I’ve always wondered what my sword could do against one of you. Want to find out?”
Wilm looked over at her. Fire burned in her eyes, but her voice was calm. “Ah. We were looking for you. I’m afraid we’re going to have to let you go. Vee?”
Vee rocketed through the air toward her. He snarled the word, “Traitor!” as he flew.
Alice gripped her sword. She had no idea if it could hurt Vee, but she really wanted to find out. Only downside was, if the sword didn’t work, she was dead.
She heard a voice through the crowd, a voice she hadn’t heard it ten years. Her father. “Alice!”
She couldn’t risk it. What good would she do if she died two seconds into the fight? Besides, she suddenly wanted to live through this, if she could. For her parents.
She Pulled Back.
“Give us the book, and we’ll leave,” Wilm said.
Okay, clearly a direct challenge wasn’t going to work. She briefly considered Pulling Back a bit further, back to when they’d been standing in the shed. That way she could wait with the sword raised, let Vee impale himself when he came crashing through the roof. But, no, that wouldn’t work either. Even if she succeeded in killing Vee, there were two others to deal with.
She had to make them believe she was still working with them. She had to trick them.
Easier said than done when your bosses were mind readers.
Still, hadn’t she done it before? Hadn’t she Pulled Back hundreds of times without their knowledge? The trick, she knew, was to not out-and-out lie to them. They could tell when she was lying, and then they’d go digging around in her head. She couldn’t give them a reason to do that.
If she could tell the truth, but spin it so it sounded like what she wanted them to hear, if there was no actual lie, they might not be tipped off and they’d have no reason to read her mind. It took them time and effort, and at the moment they had neither.
She had to make them think she was still working for them.
“Hey boss!” Alice yelled at the sky.
Wilm looked over at her, the fire burning in her eyes just like last time. “Ah. We were looking for you.”
“Yeah, I know,” she said. “Sorry about that. I Pulled Back and came here on my own.”
Wilm squinted at her. “I didn’t feel that.”
No lies, Alice reminded herself. “Yeah, I can do that now. I’ve been doing it for a while.” She paused only for a breath, not wanting to let Wilm respond. “Listen, this whole thing didn’t go so well the first time around, so I needed to come back for a redo.” Not technically a lie.
“Is that so?” Wilm asked.
“Yeah,” Alice said. “And I have good news. I know where the book is.” Not a lie, but, crap, now what? If she gave them a false location, they’d know she was lying.
This wasn’t going to work, either. She tried to Pull Back and realized she couldn’t.
San smiled. “Let’s just see how this plays out, okay?”
2.
Frank knelt on the floor next to Jake and put a hand on his forehead.
My God, Frank thought. Zed actually did it.
Jake weakly opened his eyes.
Something was keeping Jake alive, Frank realized. Jake had been dead the moment Frank stepped through the tree in Sanctuary. Now Jake had been laying here almost five minutes. He wasn’t exactly looking his best, but he wasn’t dead, either.
“Frank, are you with me?” Zed asked. “We need to pull this together very quickly. Those things out there, my former bosses, they’re not slow at killing.”
Frank nodded, then paused. “Wait. You said you’d bring back Sophie’s sister and Mason’s mom first.”
Zed looked a little annoyed. “Let me explain the situation. We are moments away from dying. Us and everyone we’ve ever cared about. So, no, I don’t have time to bring your friends back from the dead.” He paused and his voice grew a bit softer. “I will later if we live though this, but not now.”
Frank looked at Sophie. There were tears standing in her eyes. She wanted her sister back just as badly as Frank had wanted Jake. It didn’t seem fair that he should get his wish and she shouldn’t get hers. On the other hand, what would it matter if they were all dead in five minutes?
Sophie nodded, showing him it was okay through a forced smile. Frank appreciated the effort.
“Okay,” Frank said to Zed. “You said you have a plan.”
“I do,” Zed said. “It’s you.”
“Wait. What?” Frank felt his heart begin to beat faster. “No, no, no. You’ve always got a plan. If you don’t have anything better than waiting for me to come up with something, we’re all toast.”
Zed stared into Frank’s eyes, and Frank felt the crawling sensation of something squirming over his brain.
Frank tore his eyes away from Zed’s. “Don’t do that.”
Zed smiled sadly. “There’s something in there. Something big. I see it every time I look into your mind. Ever since that time I knocked on the door of your cabin in Rook Mountain. There’s something hidden away. And I don’t think even you know what it is. But I have a theory.”
Frank shook his head violently. “You’re wrong. There’s nothing hidden in my head.” He wasn’t sure why, but the very suggestion made him unreasonably angry.
Zed took a step forward. “Remember the deadlock. The lock that can only be opened with a key. Most minds are more like deadbolts. We control the bolt ourselves. But I think your mind, parts of it anyway, are a deadlock. Not even you can get into it.”
“No. You’re talking crazy.”
“I’ve been searching for the key for a long time now,” Zed continued. “I was hoping I could find it and take whatever power’s lurking up there. But I give. We’re out of time. I don’t have the key.” He looked around the room. “But maybe someone here does.”
They all looked at Zed, their eyes wide.
“We have your brother,” Zed said. “Your wife. Your former sister-in-law and her husband, the people who helped you take me down in Rook Mountain. If anyone knows what’s inside your head, it’s one of them. But,” he turned to Jake, “I’m guessing it’s him. Because he has it too. Not nearly as badly as you do. But there’s a block in his mind I can’t quite see around.”
Jake stared up at Zed, a combination of fear and anger in his eyes.
“So tell us, Jake. What is it Frank doesn’t know?”
Jake’s forehead felt hot and dry under Frank’s hand.
He looked up at Frank. His voice was weak when he spoke. “I was just talking to you. Through the tree.” Jake chuckled. “Who was that girl with the sword?”
“Long story.” Frank nodded toward Zed. “Tell this idiot. Tell him there’s not something locked in my mind.”
Jake smiled. “There’s nothing I like more than telling Zed he’s wrong. But…” He trailed off, looking at the ceiling. “I don’t know, man. When I was talking to you a few minutes ago, I mentioned the quarry. You acted like you had no idea what I was talking about.”
Frank felt like the room was spinning. Something was tickling the back of his mind. He’d felt it before, the first time Jake had mentioned the quarry and again when Zed claimed Frank had burned the Rook Mountain book. It didn’t feel nice. It made him nauseous, actually. He wanted to push it away.
He suddenly knew Zed was right. There was something in there. Something he didn’t want to face. “I don’t…” Frank said. “I don’t know what the quarry is.”
Jake reached up with a weak hand and touched his brother’s arm. “Yes, you do. We used to go there every day after school.”
Frank felt a stabbing pain behind his eyes. “I don’t know. I can’t.”
He felt Sophie’s arm slip around his shoulders.
“Yes you can, Frank,” Zed said. “And I think I’ve given you a way in. I brought Jake here. Which means that he was gone when you walked through that tree. But also that he wasn’t.”
Frank groaned.
“Picture it, Frank. Remember.”
Frank did. He remembered stepping through that tree and seeing Sophie for the first time. His dead brother was at his feet. He also remembered stepping through the tree and Sophie telling him Jake had vanished a moment before Frank had stepped through.
“Now,” Zed said. “There are two sets of memories. See if you can peek between them. Look into the secret part of your mind.”
Frank didn’t want to. It hurt to think about it. But he had to. He knew he had to.
He forced his way into the gap, and a flood of memories hit him.
3.
Rook Mountain
1996
They left school and headed toward the quarry. Frank wanted to swing by the house and get a Mountain Dew and maybe a granola bar or something, but Jake wouldn’t hear of it. If they went home, Sean Lee would likely spot them. And if that happened he’d either try to talk them into playing a game of pick-up basketball or want to follow them wherever they were going. Playing basketball with Sean wasn’t much fun due to his aversion to playing defense—No D Lee they called him—and he certainly couldn’t follow them where they were going.
The quarry was Jake and Frank’s secret.
They rode up Baron Mills Road, nine-year-old Frank pedaling as hard as he could trying to keep up with his eleven-year-old brother. Jake didn’t wait around, and Frank didn’t blame him. They were both excited to get there.
They turned onto a tiny trail. It was so small you might not have noticed it if you were walking past, and you definitely wouldn’t notice it if you were driving. It was a sickly, winding dirt thing. Leaves and branches smacked against Frank’s bare arms as he went down the trail. It didn’t hurt, exactly. He wasn’t going fast enough for it to really make a difference. In fact, it made things even more exciting. He felt like Indiana Jones, blazing his way toward the idol, dodging traps and pitfalls every step of the way. Sometimes he even muttered to himself, “This belongs in a museum.” Never when Jake was too close, though.
By the time Frank reached the small clearing where the trail veered off to the right, Jake was sitting on the ground, arms crossed over his legs, bike on the ground next to him as if he’d been waiting for hours. Only the small beads of sweat on his forehead and his heavy breathing betrayed the fact that he’d put any effort into getting here so quickly. Frank had recently gone through a growth spurt that had cut the height difference between him and his brother to an inch or so. Now Jake was having to push himself to make it seem like he was still so physically superior.
It made Frank feel a little good, catching up to Jake. He knew it wouldn’t last. Jake would hit his next growth spurt and shoot ahead of him again. But it made Frank feel slightly sad, too. His big brother wouldn’t always be bigger. At some point, Jake would stop having growth spurts and Frank would catch up with him.
But that was a long way off. For today, they had the quarry.
Frank hopped off his bike before it stopped rolling and let it fall to the grass. Jake jumped to his feet. It was a race to the quarry. Both boys held nothing back. Frank had a slight head start, but even though his legs were almost as long as Jake’s now, they weren’t nearly as strong. Jake jetted past him and squirmed his way through the entrance to the quarry.
Frank sighed. Always second place.
They’d discovered the quarry two months ago while playing in the woods. No, Jake didn’t like to call it playing anymore. He was too old for playing. Exploring, then. Or hiking. Whatever you wanted to call it, they’d been riding down Baron Mills Road on their bikes when Frank had wiped out while trying to do a wheelie. The downside was he’d scraped up his right knee and elbow pretty good. The upside was they’d discovered the trail.
They’d followed the trail, ignoring the blood running down Frank’s arm and leg. It had seemed so strange. How many times had they been down that road? They were less than a mile from their house, and there was a trail they didn’t know about? It seemed impossible. Worse, it seemed wrong; it was an affront to their dominion over their neighborhood kingdom. That rebellious trail had come into their land and set up shop without even a courtesy hello to the land’s rulers.
Once they’d gotten over the initial shock and indignation, they’d been quite happy about the trail. After all, if they hadn’t known about it, it was a safe bet that none of the other kids in the neighborhood did, either. The trail was theirs. The Hinkle boys. And woe to the kid who tried to encroach on their precious territory.
It wasn’t until their third day exploring the trail that they’d found the hole in the hillside, and it wasn’t until the fifth trip that they worked up the courage to climb into the hole.
It was a cave. Not a huge cave, not the Batcave or anything, but a big enough cave that you could stand up and move around in there. The ground was rocky, and it sloped away from the entrance in a way that made Jake think of the piles of rocks at Fred’s workplace at the beginning of the Flintstones. So they’d dubbed the cave the quarry. Neither of them knew exactly what the word really meant, but it had a nice ring to it. And giving the cave its own name made it feel even more special.
They began visiting the cave, exploring there on a regular basis. It was a kid’s dream. A cave of their own. They came home, night after night, the cave’s red mud covering their clothes. Their mom wasn’t exactly the hands-on type, so as long as they started their own laundry, she didn’t much care.
And, beyond all reason, they actually managed to keep the place secret.
Somehow, it wasn’t until their fourth time going inside the cave that they found the shelf. It was built into a wall, tucked back in a corner. To call it a shelf was a bit grand. It was actually just a level surface dug out of the mud, creating a little space. And on the shelf, there was a book and a knife.
Frank was immediately drawn to the knife. It was sharp as all hell as he quickly and painfully learned, and it looked like it would slide between a pirate’s ribs without too much trouble. Best of all, there was a strange symbol on the knife’s handle. A clock with a crack running down the middle.
Frank liked to pretend it was some ancient Cherokee weapon, never mind the clearly modern clock carved into it. Maybe it was left by a dying Cherokee chief as he held off his enemies while the children of the tribe huddled in the cave behind him. Or maybe it belonged to a Cherokee princess who’d used it to cut her own throat after her father had forced her to marry someone she didn’t love.
Mostly, Frank just used it to whittle sticks into slightly sharper sticks.
But Jake, he only had eyes for the book.
The book was at least three inches thick and bound with a rich red leather that almost perfectly matched the color of the mud in the quarry. It too had a symbol: a river with a crack running through it. A broken river. That didn’t even make sense to Frank, but Jake seemed to like it.
The fact that both the knife and the book carried similar symbols and they were found together made it hard to deny they were somehow related. That complicated Frank’s Cherokee fantasy, but whatever. Maybe the book had belonged to the chief’s dorky brother.
The curious thing about the book was that the pages were blank.
But that didn’t stop Jake. He looked at those pages under the pale beam of his flashlight like they had naked women on them or something. Jake was like that with books. Frank only read when forced by threat of failing school, but Jake read for fun. Jake loved stories. Frank made his own.
Staring at blank pages? That was just weird.
But whatever. Frank played with his knife and Jake looked at his blank book, all by the light of a couple flashlights. He’d thought that sitting around a damp and—to be honest—kind of smelly cave would have gotten old fast. But it didn’t. Something about th
e place was exciting. They were drawn there. Frank couldn’t stop thinking about it when they weren’t there, and he knew it was the same for Jake. So they’d started going every day.
Then things had started to get weird. Not with Frank; he was still just sharpening sticks, business as usual. The problem was Jake. He swore some of the pages had words on them.
Frank checked. They most definitely did not.
But Jake wouldn’t be talked out of it. He started talking about how the words were there, Frank just couldn’t see them. They hadn’t revealed themselves to Frank.
It got so Frank stopped looking forward to going down to the cave. Not so much that he stopped going, but enough that his feelings about the place were mixed at best. Despite his concern for his brother, he found he couldn’t stay away. That knife was just too cool.
Frank stood by the entrance to the quarry. He saw a dim light inside and knew Jake would have already moved to his usual place in the corner and would have the book in his hand. Weird.
Frank squeezed through the entrance and took the knife off the shelf. He sat down, pulled a stick out of his backpack—he carried them with him everywhere now—and started whittling. He didn’t ever do anything with the sharp sticks except throw them into his backpack. If vampires ever attacked Rook Mountain, he would totally be ready.
Frank whittled and let his mind wander.
That was one of his favorite things about working with the knife. Normally he had a hard time relaxing. It felt like his mind was always going a million miles per hour, thoughts, worries, feelings, rushing through his head. But when he held the knife, it felt so easy to just let all that drift away.
He didn’t know how long had passed before a strange groaning sound woke him from his wanderings.
It was Jake.
Jake was staring straight ahead, unblinking. Frank’s first thought was, Is that how I look when I’m spacing out? His second was, Something’s not right.
The strained groan came from Jake’s throat again. It was a deep, gurgling sound. A sound that shouldn’t come from an eleven-year-old boy. His finger was moving across the page of the open book in a strange, methodical fashion.
